Open Source Society

Information Infrastructure for the Open-Minded Business Part 1

One of the most important components of a medium to large business is its email and collaboration system. Being able to easily and quickly share contacts, calendars, tasks, and ancillary information is critical to keeping productivity at a maximum. The industry standard for this for many years now has been system based largely upon Microsoft’s Exchange Server and Sharepoint software. It provides a centrally managed and secure platform for email, contacts, calendars, tasks, and intranet information that is easy to use and practical to maintain for the small business to the large corporation.

The downside is that there is a significant initial investment to get the system up and running, and once invested you are limited to using Microsoft’s proprietary client applications if you want to enjoy the full benefits and capabilities of the system. Naturally this means that any growth in staff means investing more money in additional software licenses on top of any expenditures for new hardware. These costs can and do add up quickly.

What if there were a way to create an internal information infrastructure (say that three times fast) that was cheap to deploy, and even cheaper to scale up? Well there is!

First of all, let’s examine the costs of a typical Exchange Server deployment on a network of 10-20 users, and on a network of 100+ users.

One thing any Exchange administrator knows is that it can at times be a resource hog, so skimping on the hardware is not an option unless you don’t mind frequent delays and outages. At the time of this writing, a typical server platform that will perform reasonably well with up to 50 users is no less than $1,000. A license for Windows Server 2008 is $1,000, and a license for Exchange Server Standard edition is $700. Assuming you have your own in-house IT person to deploy the system, you’ve just dropped $2,700 on a system no one can even use yet! Before anyone on your network can connect to the Exchange system, you need to hand out another $200-$400 per user for a Microsoft Office licenses. For a company of 20 people, this is between $4,000 and $8,000. So all told for an office of just 20 people, you’ve spent $6,700 to $10,700, not including labor costs if you have to contract out to someone to install and deploy the system.

If your network is even larger, with 100 users or more, your costs increase dramatically. You’ll be looking at closer to $2,000 or more for the server itself, Server 2008 Enterprise is $4,000, and Exchange Server Enterprise is $4,000, plus the unavoidable client licensing at $400 per employee. A larger business might be able to absorb these costs more easily, but $10,000 plus deployment and client costs is still a large amount of money to spend.

But what other option is there? Nothing else approaches the ease and power of Exchange, does it?

Enter the Open Source. Windows Buffs and maybe even some Linux gurus are scoffing right now, and rightfully so. For a long time Microsoft has reigned supreme in the world of corporate information infrastructure. In all fairness Exchange is a great product with proven user and administrator-friendliness. Perhaps its greatest downfall is the sticker shock, and there are questions about its stability and security in some scenarios.

But indulge me for a moment in a mental sidebar and you’ll see that there are alternatives and good reasons to give them serious thought. One of the most popular articles on my blog here at OSS is the article on how to get Mozilla Thunderbird to integrate with Exchange. It gets more hits than anything else I’ve written, and “Thunderbird Exchange” is the most popular search term for my humble site. The catch, however, is that most folks aren’t looking for ways to get their email from Exchange with Thunderbird. That isn’t an exceedingly difficult task for someone with a moderate amount of tech savvy. What people are looking for is a way to get the full functionality of Outlook with its calendering, tasking, and address book features, out of the humble contender from the Mozilla project.

Unfortunately, at this point in time, that just isn’t possible. Thunderbird can not integrate with the Exchange calendar, and sometimes doing so can result in undesired consequences for both the user and the server itself. Thunderbird can access the Active Directory catalog with some work (see this article for more on how to do this), and something similar to the “push” effect can be achieved by using IMAP, but this just isn’t the same.

So why not take Exchange out of the equation altogether? Let’s see how much we save in money alone by moving to an open source collaboration server. The only deployment cost is what you decide to spend on the server itself. You can go totally open, and can do just fine with a $1,000 server if you are a large organization. If you only have 50 users or less, you can even use a second-hand server with something like a Pentium 4 with a couple gigs of RAM and spend $500 or less. You can also use a Windows-based server running open source services, but despite what you may think this is not an easier to manage setup. If you go this route, expect to spend a bit more for a Windows server license and more powerful hardware. If you want to use something very competitive to Sharepoint as an internal or external company website, take a look at O3 Spaces which works with Microsoft Office or Open Office and provides some excellent tools for collaboration and presentation. There is a free Community Edition, or you can opt for a paid subscription which gets you support and updates for 59 Euros per year per user. All of the other software you need to implement a completely open system works along the same method. You can get all of the parts for free (except the hardware, unless you’re a scrounger like myself), but you are certainly welcome to pay for a license in most cases which will usually get you professional support and access to updates sooner.

Wow, what a difficult choice! $7,000+ minimum, plus hundreds more every time your business grows, or $2,000 or less in most cases for the same, if not better, functionality, and no further investment needed, no matter how much you grow. You be the judge.

I’m sure now that you’re all wondering about the details of how this is done. So over the course of my next few articles I’m going to show you what pieces you will need, how they work, and how to put them all together to make a robust, secure, and extremely productive backbone for your company. You’ll find that it’s not nearly as difficult as you think, and the benefits are well worth the effort. But just as a teaser, here are the things we’re going to use server-side:

• Fedora Core Linux: This will be the underlying operating system we’ll use. It is secure, stable, and battle-tested for stability.
• Fedora Directory Services: This is a group of tools that are similar to Microsoft’s Active Directory, and will provide organization, information, and security to the other services running on our network.
• Cyrus IMAP: An email server that provides functionality that is identical to Microsoft Exchange in most if not all respects, and has some great security features.
• O3 Spaces: A web-based intranet system similar to Microsoft Sharepoint that allows users to share information and files and collaborate on projects.
• Apache with WebDAV: This will provide a shared calendar and task server that can be integrated with Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, or Mozilla Sunbird.

On the client side we’ll be using Open Office, Mozilla Thunderbird, Mozilla Firefox, and Mozilla Sunbird. The server will work for any client operating system, including Windows. However, Linux and even Mac clients will see slightly more benefits as the possibility for implementing centralized authentication and information exchange becomes available. We will be testing with clients running OpenSuSE and Windows XP. Until next time, happy exploring!